The Texas Education Agency lacks the ability to detect cheating on school accountability measures, and instead relies on school districts to police themselves, the State Auditor's Office said in a report to be released today.

The audit report, which was requested last year by Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams to examine how the agency failed to detect widespread cheating at the El Paso Independent School District in 2010, raises questions about the integrity of the Texas school accountability system.

REPORTER

Andrew Kreighbaum

The report found that TEA "does not have sufficient processes and controls in place to effectively identify and investigate possible noncompliance with school accountability requirements."

TEA has relied on school districts and charter schools to investigate themselves for possible cheating, and "lacks a consistent and defined process for performing investigations and does not have comprehensive procedures that guide investigators in conducting consistent and thorough investigations," the report found.

The state auditor found that several TEA administrators believed they were not responsible for identifying cheating.

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TEA provided a copy of the audit report Thursday to the El Paso Times, whose investigation throughout 2012 documented the cheating at EPISD that TEA missed two years earlier.

The report concluded TEA does not analyze data that might reveal systemic cheating and does not have a process for school employees to report questionable practices.

Williams, who took over at the agency a year ago and was not involved in the 2010 cheating investigation, said in an interview Thursday that the report pointed to leadership failures at the agency under his predecessor, Robert Scott, who was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2007 and served until 2012.

"This was an entire organizational breakdown and I think, quite frankly, it started at the top of the organization," Williams said in an interview with the Times. "It started with the old leadership team, who failed this agency, failed the people of the city of El Paso and failed this state."

The leaders identified by position though not by name in the report -- Scott and former Deputy Commissioner Ray Glynn -- have left the agency. Scott is now with Austin-based lobbying firm Texas Star Alliance and Glynn is executive director of Region 8 Education Service Center in Pittsburg, Texas.

Scott and Glynn did not respond to requests for comment from the Times on Thursday.

In addition to determining that TEA lacks the ability to investigate cheating, the State Auditors Office excoriated the agency for failing to investigate then-state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh's 2010 allegations that EPISD was cheating on state and federal accountability measures by "disappearing" Mexican immigrant students at Bowie High School and other schools.

"The agency failed to perform a thorough and effective investigation of serious cheating allegations at EPISD. As a result, the agency did not identify the cheating schemes in place at EPISD," the report said.

Williams said it was the position of the state auditor as well as his own opinion that previous leaders, rather than individual TEA employees, were responsible for oversight failures. He said no personnel actions are currently contemplated involving current TEA employees.

"This is a new agency, this is a new leadership team and this leadership team understands the importance of aggressively ferreting out and identifying the truth," he said.

He said TEA was committed to fulfilling all recommendations in the audit, which call for the agency to create new positions to investigate and detect cheating.

Despite the audit's finding that TEA has lacked the ability to ferret out cheating, Williams said Texans could still be confident in the accountability system as a whole.

"You can see how youngsters performed on other tests, how they performed on national tests," he said. Performance on those other tests reflect improvements in Texas educational performance that have been shown in state and federal accountability measures, he said.

Audit background

Under former Superintendent Lorenzo García, who served from 2006 to 2011, high-level administrators at EPISD directed a cheating scheme that gamed state and federal accountability standards by preventing academically struggling students -- particularly Mexican immigrants -- from taking the 10th-grade standardized test used to determine federal adequate yearly progress ratings. Administrators removed some students from campuses entirely, while others were improperly retained in the ninth grade or promoted to the 11th grade.

García was arrested on federal fraud charges in August 2011 that alleged he steered a no-bid $450,000 contract to his mistress. He resigned in November of that year.

In June 2012, García pleaded guilty to that fraud charge and another that alleged he led a scheme to defraud the federal accountability system. He is serving a 3 -year federal prison sentence. The FBI and El Paso district attorney are conducting criminal investigations into EPISD cheating, but no one else has been charged.

Shapleigh first made allegations to TEA that the district gamed accountability standards in May 2010. But two separate reviews by the TEA that year cleared EPISD of wrongdoing.

The state auditor's report concluded the agency's requirement that districts and charter schools investigate themselves does not account for conflicts of interest that could stymie findings of cheating.

"This was the situation at EPISD, where district and school administrators had implemented the cheating scheme," the report read.

TEA then failed to verify the information of local audits on which its own investigations were based.

Shapleigh later brought the complaints to the U.S. Department of Education. That agency's inspector general issued a report earlier this year that found cheating at Bowie High School -- a focus of the allegations -- as well as Coronado High School and EPISD as a whole.

Williams last year ordered the removal of the El Paso school board, saying the board had lost public trust by failing to quickly respond to the cheating allegations. A five-member board of managers appointed by Williams is empowered to run the district for up to two years.

Shapleigh said TEA's failure to detect the cheating in 2010 has brought serious consequences to the state.

"TEA's utter failure to act for years and years let Lorenzo García's cancer spread across Texas," Shapleigh said. "As a result, thousands of children here and elsewhere have suffered real harm. TEA needs a top to bottom house cleaning."

Shapleigh said Scott received detailed data and sworn testimony from his office but had no intention of pursuing an investigation that would lead to conclusions of wrongdoing by friends at EPISD or at testing contractors.

The now-ousted Board of Trustees at EPISD had long insisted they relied on the findings of the two TEA reviews in 2010. However, other community leaders faulted the school board for surrendering much of its authority to García and never conducting its own investigations.

"We were counting on TEA to do its job the first time we asked them to help; and TEA let EPISD and the state of Texas down every time they failed to conduct an adequate investigation into the wrong-doing that was being alleged by our community leaders, our parents, teachers, and our board of trustees," former Board of Trustees President Isela Castañon-Williams said in an emailed statement.

Despite Castañon-Williams' statement, there is no evidence that any school board member ever lodged allegations of cheating by García or other administrators.

She called for further federal reviews into TEA's oversight failures while it received millions in federal dollars tied to accountability standards -- many of which went to districts like EPISD.

Problems elsewhere

The problems first identified at EPISD by the Times investigation in 2012 have surfaced at other El Paso County school districts and elsewhere in the state.

Internal investigations by the Socorro, Canutillo and San Elizario school districts in El Paso County earlier this year found cheating similar to that found at EPISD.

In the wake of an external audit report at Socorro this month, the McAllen Independent School District in South Texas said it would seek its own external review after the Socorro audit questioned its policies for placement and retention of migrant students, without alleging actual cheating.

And a Houston Independent School District principal resigned this month after a TEA investigation found educators at his former high school in Uvalde prevented students from taking standardized tests to boost federal accountability ratings from 2008 to 2010.

Warning signs

A former senior EPISD administrator alleged last year that he alerted TEA in June 2010 to allegations of transcript improprieties at Bowie High School.

In a November interview with the Times, James Anderson, then the assistant superintendent for secondary schools, said Scott and other top TEA officials refused his request for a TEA investigation. Instead, EPISD was told to conduct its own investigation, Anderson said.

He said García identified Glynn, then the TEA deputy commissioner, as a personal friend.

Anderson resigned earlier this year after the school district began efforts to fire him over his alleged role in the cheating scheme. He has said he did nothing wrong and tried to bring the scheme to the state's attention.

Education Commissioner Williams initially said after taking office last year that he wasn't sure there was a need for an independent investigation of why TEA failed to detect cheating at EPISD in 2010. However, he requested that the state auditor conduct such an investigation in November 2012, as the Times began questioning the agency about Anderson's allegations.

EPISD's internal auditor finished his investigation in August 2010, finding that dozens of Bowie transcripts had been altered, including illegal grade changes and unexplained promotions from ninth to 11th grade, according to records obtained last year by the Times through the Texas Public Information Act.

The Times investigation and the U.S. Department of Education audit found that Garcia ordered the internal audit kept in draft form for months so that it wouldn't be subject to open records laws. The report was finalized in May 2011, nine months after it was finished.

The internal audit was never made public until the Times uncovered it in April 2012. EPISD officials sent the audit to TEA a month later, nearly two years after the state agency had completed its investigation that cleared the district of cheating allegations.

There is no indication that TEA officials in 2010 asked EPISD about the internal audit, even though several top state officials were aware that it was underway.

Recommendations

The state auditor's report recommends the TEA create an office of complaints, investigations and school accountability headed by a new senior officer to better screen and investigate reports of improper practices at school districts. The report also said the agency should change its policies to accept anonymous complaints, which staffers ignored or failed to follow up on in its investigation of the cheating at EPISD.

Williams said the agency has already changed its policies to account for anonymous complaints. The agency also has established an internal hotline and email address for employees to report wrongdoing. And a formal process was created to keep the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the House and other lawmakers apprised of investigations.

He said by the close of the year, the new investigations office should be active, although he declined to say how large that office might be or whether additional funding from the state is necessary.

"There is going to be a very high level prosecutor, and then we're going to have to look into what extent can we use resources that are already in the building," he said.

State Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, said TEA appeared to have taken a good first step in addressing the issues identified in the audit. But he said the agency should go further in holding employees involved in its failures accountable.

"Any employee that had duties and responsibilities in investigating the complaints surrounding the school district's issues, if those employees are still there, those employees need to be held accountable," he said. "Whether they're part of the leadership team or not."